Open source matters to open government. Really.

â€œOpen source and open government are not the same,â€ Iâ€™ve been reading recently. When discussing the role of open standards in open government transparency projects, Bob Caudill at Adobe, is concerned that open source and open standards are being conflated. He likes open standards just fine, but:

â€œOpen standards are driving for interoperability between systems or applications, while, the goal of open source is to make high-quality software available to the market free of charge.â€

As an open source advocate, Iâ€™m surprised. What, I have to wonder, is so threatening about open source? Why the effort to take open source off the table? Iâ€™ve written on the topic before, and I didnâ€™t think this was controversial â€” but apparently I was wrong. Andrea DiMaio at Gartner is more pointed:

While they both agree on the importance of open standards (although transparency also seems to annoy DiMaio), they also remind us that tools, proprietary or open source, are a means to an end. An open standard is an open standard, whether implemented by an open source project or a proprietary one. Whatâ€™s important, they insist, is more transparency, collaboration, and participation. Open source is immaterial at best, and a distraction at worst.

Theyâ€™re right, of course, that open standards are crucial to ensuring meaningful transparency in government. It does not follow, however, that this precludes a role for open source.Â Open source software is an invaluable tool â€” one of many â€” to approach all three goals (transparency, collaboration, participation) of the Open Government Directive. Itâ€™s not about open source software specifically, although the software helps. Itâ€™s about the process that open source projects use to create good software. Because the open source development process requires real collaboration, tangible progress towards a goal, and the participation of a broad community of users and developers, itâ€™s an excellent mechanism for getting citizens involved in the work of government.

DiMaio couldnâ€™t disagree more. Referring to Nat Torkingtonâ€™s idea of using the open source development model to improve transparency projects:

â€œâ€¦there is a fundamental flaw in this line of thought. Open source projects cluster a number of developers who collaborate on an equal footing to develop a product they are jointly responsible for, as a community.

â€œGovernment does not have the luxury of doing so. An agency publishing crime statistics or weather forecast or traffic information is ultimately accountable for what it publishes.â€

I couldnâ€™t disagree more. Again, DiMaio and Caudill misunderstand how the open source process works and what it can contribute. The trouble, I think, is with a too-narrow understanding of what participation and collaboration might mean, and a similarly narrow view of what the open source development process has to offer.

The goal of open source is much more than just making no-cost software, as Caudill suggests. Itâ€™s about producing better software through a process of inclusion and rough consensus. The source code is free of charge largely because that is the best way to create a large community around the project, itâ€™s not the final goal. And while some open source projects function better than others, they are not, as a rule, unaccountable. In order for the projects to succeed, they must be highly accountable to their community.Â Further, many open source projects have commercial ventures (like my company, Red Hat) that live or die by their success, which makes them extremely accountable. So to say that the government cannot rely on open source software or the open source process because it is unaccountable is just not true. We know this to be the case because you can find the government using open source software in the Army, the NSA, the Census, the White House, and just about everywhere else. So thereâ€™s no reason to think that open source process cannot inform and support an open data project, as DiMaio suggests.

Setting accountability to the side, the more interesting conversation is how open source can bring some unique benefits to open government, unavailable any other way.

If you look at the outstanding work of pro-transparency organizations like the Sunlight Foundation, govtrack.us, RECAP, and others, nearly all are using open source and the open source development model. Itâ€™s not, as DiMaio and Caudill suggest, because theyâ€™re naive ideologues who are confused as to the meaning of â€œopenâ€. These are smart people doing serious work. Theyâ€™re using open source because itâ€™s the best way to collect a large number of contributors around a common problem. Theyâ€™re using open source because the transparency of the process and software makes their work credible. Theyâ€™re using open source because they believe that free access to government data means free access to the tools that make that data useful.

The alternative is closed, proprietary tools, which do little to further the transparency goals. RECAP, for example, had a difficult time understanding the US Courtsâ€™ closed PACER system, and had to do a lot of difficult reverse-engineering to work with it effectively. The job would have been significantly easier if they had access to the PACER software source code. Fortunately, because RECAP is an open source project, their hard work making PACER usable is now available to everyone. So to dismiss open source as irrelevant to the crucial work of making government data available and valuable to the private citizen, and the even more important work of encouraging a collaboration between government and its citizen, is deeply misguided.

Again, even though data transparency seems to annoy DiMaio, I think thereâ€™s good reason for the tremendous transparency effort the administration and the private sector have brought to bear. First, data transparency is a relatively simple problem to solve. Itâ€™s easy to publish data on the Internet, and thereâ€™s a tremendous amount of value to be extracted. So while itâ€™s only a part of the challenge â€” indeed, is only one leg of the Open Government Directive â€” itâ€™s an easy win for both government and its citizens.

But DiMaio is correct that open government is about much more than just data, so letâ€™s generalize this further. We could understand open government as an opportunity to increase the quality of interaction between citizens and their government through collaboration. â€œThe government is not a vending machine,â€ as Tim Oâ€™Reilly paraphased Frank DiGiammarino of the National Academy of Public Administration, â€œwhich we kick when it doesnâ€™t work right.â€ Instead of treating government as a black box, we should treat our government as the place where we, in the public and private sector, come together, to solve problems as a group. This is why we refer to â€œgovernment as a platform.â€ Yes, as DiMaio says, each agency is responsible for its own output. But that doesnâ€™t mean the public has no stake. Precisely because we want to hold agencies to a higher standard, we must provide a means of collaboration and participation.

The trouble is, thereâ€™s a lot more of us than there is of them. How can one agency effectively collaborate with 300 million constituents? Likewise, how can an agency effectively communicate with that many people? One of the reasons the open government movement is so preoccupied with technology and the Internet is that they represent a solution to this problem. For the first time, the government and its citizens have the means to work effectively at this scale. There are all kinds of tools for this: social networking, blogging, data.gov, the Ideascale Open Government sites, and so on. One of those tools, the one that is most interesting to me, is the open source development process.

Note that I didnâ€™t say open source software. Although I love the software, and could talk for days about why the government should be using more of it, itâ€™s the process that creates this software that is most valuable to the goals of collaboration and participation.

In the last 40 years, open source software communities have learned how to effectively solve complex tasks with large, far-flung, geographically dispersed communities. Why wouldnâ€™t we take these methods, and apply them to the task of creating a better government? As I mentioned earlier, Nat Torkington suggested using the open source process to improve data quality. The NASA CoLab project uses open source software and the open source development process alongside other collaborative tools to get researchers from the public and private sector to work together. The Defense Information Systems Agency is using the forge.mil project to encourage collaboration between the DOD and its contractors â€” not just for software, but for testing, certification, and project management. The Apps for Democracy, Apps for Army, and Apps for America contests are all attempts to harness the collective intelligence of citizens and government to solve common problems using the open source model â€” not just building tools, but building the means to collaborate on top of open tools, like Open 311 and DataMasher.

Both DiMaio and Caudill make the mistake of believing that open source is about making cheap bits. Instead, itâ€™s a blueprint for effective collaboration on a massive scale. Advocates for open source in government, like me and my friends at Open Source for America, arenâ€™t just talking about open source tools, although those are also useful. We believe that the open source development model has a concrete contribution to make to the open government movement â€” and those who dismiss open source as irrelevant donâ€™t realize just how open a government can be.

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About Gunnar Hellekson

I’m the Chief Technology Strategist for Red Hat’s US Public Sector group, where I work with systems integrators and government agencies to encourage the use of open source software in government. I was recently named co-chair of Open Source for America and one of Federal Computer Week’s Fed 100 for 2010. I’m an active member of the Military Open Source working group, the RHCE Loopback, and a GTO-21 commissioner. I also help run Red Hat’s gov-sec mailing list. I perk up when people talk about cross-domain security, edge innovation, and interagency collaboration through the open source model.
Prior to joining Red Hat, I worked as a developer, systems administrator, and IT director for a series of internet businesses. I’ve also been a business and IT consultant to not-for-profit organizations in New York City. During that time, I spearheaded the reform of safety regulations for New York State’s electrical utilities following the tragic death of Jodie Lane.
When I’m not spreading the Good News about open source, I’m wishing I had a dog.
You can find what I’m reading on Goodreads, what I’m saying on Twitter, and what I’m listening to on last.fm.

7 Responses

I wanted to take a moment and respond to your implication that I am suggesting open source software and processes are threatening and should be “removed from the table”. Now it is I who am surprised, so much so, that I went back to reread my entire post in an attempt to understand the basis for your allegation.

I will admit that I did not fully articulate my complete understanding of open source, (nor of open standards for that matter) but, your suggestion that I do not understand the point of open source could not be further from the truth. I am and have been for many years, a believer in both open standards and open source.

However, convincing the audience that I know everything there is to know about open source or open standards was not the intent of my post. I simply wished to point out that putting the word ‘open’ in front of another word does not automatically make a concept equal or mutually exclusive.

It was not my desire to attack any particular approach for solving government challenges, on the contrary, all I wished to do was provide food for thought and to help people make better “open minded” decisions, focusing first on a desired outcome as the goal, rather than the means to get there.

I think we agree that it’s counterproductive to blindly entangle open source and open government. I wrote this article because I fear that in an effort to discourage this doctrinaire approach, we might throw the baby out with the bathwater and overlook all that open source has to offer the open government movement.

I’m very glad to hear that you consider open source a viable tool for enabling the goals of the Open Government Directive. I’m even more glad to hear that we agree that open source shouldn’t be used for its own sake, but for the real and tangible benefits it could provide.

What neither of us has pointed out very overtly is that open source and open standards are linked. With the former you get the blue prints for the latter. That is quite important, especially if you are trying to track the transformational processes of your open data…

Very good to see this article. I’m not sure that you wrote what you meant just below your quote from Nat Torkington above. You say “I couldnâ€™t disagree more” but from your tone, I suspect you meant to say “I couldn’t agree more” (in contrast to Andrea DiMaio in the previous paragraph). Perhaps I’m wrong on that, but it seems that you’re generally supporting Nat’s thesis rather than disagreeing with it elsewhere in the article. If you do disagree, then it’s not clear to me how you do.

The quote preceeding my comment is from Mr. DiMaio, not Mr. Torkington. When I said I “couldn’t disagree more”, I was referring to DiMaio’s notion of government exceptionalism when it comes to collaborative projects, not Torkington’s post. I see how you could be confused.